The terms of the deal, through which Google will take a stake of about 10 per cent, requires Anthropic to use the money to buy computing resources from the search company’s cloud computing division, said three people familiar with the arrangement.
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While Microsoft has sought to integrate OpenAI’s technology into many of its own services, Google’s relationship with Anthropic is limited to acting as the company’s tech supplier in what has become an AI arm’s race, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
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"Anthropic has developed an intelligent chatbot called Claude, rivalling OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though it has not yet been released publicly."
"The start-up had raised more than $700mn before Google’s investment, which was made in late 2022 but has not previously been reported. The company’s biggest investor is Alameda Research, the crypto hedge fund of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, which put in $500mn before filing for bankruptcy last year. FTX’s bankruptcy estate has flagged Anthropic as an asset that may help creditors with recoveries."
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"Google’s investment was made by its cloud division, run by former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian. Bringing Anthropic’s data-intensive computing work to Google’s data centres is part of an effort to catch up with the lead Microsoft has taken in the fast-growing AI market thanks to its work with OpenAI. Google’s cloud division is also working with other start-ups such as Cohere and C3 to try to secure a bigger foothold in AI."
I'd be interested in hearing someone from Anthropic discuss the upsides or downsides of this arrangement. From an entirely personal standpoint, it seems odd that Anthropic gave up equity AND had restrictions in how the investment could be used. That said, I imagine there are MANY other details about I'm not aware of since I wasn't involved in the decision.
My assumption is (and I'm definitely not sure about this) that restricting funding to compute is not very restrictive at all, given that (a) Anthropic probably does and will spend large sums of money on compute, likely more than this investment covers, and (b) the money they're currently spending on compute can easily be shifted to other areas now that it's freed up. (If Anthropic aren't currently using Google Cloud Platform, I guess it's more restrictive in that it forces Anthropic to migrate to another cloud service provider.) But yeah, I'd also be curious to hear an insider's view on this.